I’ve just spent 20 minutes working on the beginnings of a draft IA for the futuremuseum website.
For this, I used an online mind-mapping tool called Mindmeister, which I’ve used successfully with loads of clients before.
Mind-mapping is ideal for sketching out information architecture because the node-type visual approach appeals to people far more than text; also it is extremely easy to move nodes around, try new things, infer links and so on. Mindmeister adds to this functionality by providing the means to collaborate – once I’d drafted this top-level navigation, I just sent Dan the link via Skype for him to look over and amend.
The actual components of the IA are simple at this stage – to get them I just spent a few minutes browsing a couple of museum websites and compared / contrasted between them to extract the common components. We’ll develop this as we go (feel free to bookmark the direct link to the map!) – it’ll be interesting to see which bits change as we go along.
If you’ve got any ideas for missing bits (I should add: feasible missing bits!), please let us know in the comments!
Time spent developing IA: 20 minutes
Money spent: £0.00
Quick thought – on the ’stay in touch’ side though I love Twitter, Facebook is perhaps going to give you more reach?
Couple of other ideas:
Donations? Can people donate things to the collection
Outreach? Does the museum offer outreach activities, school visits etc.
Thanks Owen – really useful thoughts.
Yes, I think you could well be right. We’ll look into setting up a Facebook page / group / whatever it is (!?).
Donations: no, not as such, but we will probably be asking people to contribute, so it’s a good point. Will add to my back-brain
Outreach: no, not in this instance
cheers!
Mike
Can I suggest Upcoming/Future exhibitions? Also an area for downloading the brochure/PDF to encourage some advance reading but also head towards some greener credentials buy making the PDF usable on smart phones.
Hi Mark – yes, good plan re. upcoming / future exhibitions. Will think on the PDF idea too.
Thanks!
Curious about the IA here. Does this assume that the proposed museum has one and only one “collection” or can the institution hold multiple “collections” each with the services/pages listed here?
While some kinds of collections can merely be reduced to categories (e.g. the Print Collection, the Ceramics Collection, etc”) this doesn’t seem like it could accommodate the “Mike Ellis Collection” which defines the key characteristics of how/why this “nervous expression, 2 laptops, and bag of wires” are related to each other.
Traditionally this would suggest a separate collection-level description, but there could be other unorthodox ways of doing this.